William F Buckley

The former CIA station chief in Beirut was honored today during a memorial service at his symbolic tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, nearly three years after he died as a hostage in Lebanon. CIA Director William H. Webster eulogized William F. Buckley as a man who "did things that none of the rest would have done. . . . He lived by example." Buckley, the 51st CIA agent to die in the line of duty, had the "ability to handle tough situations," Webster said.

I am not in the habit of agreeing with anything William F. Buckley says, as a rule, but have to agree to his assessment that women have no business in the military (Column Right, Sept. 14). Polls revealed that "unwanted sexual attention," as well as "sexual coercion" and even "sexual assault," were the norm in the military. And why should it not be the norm? It probably is in all other groups of the citizenry. We have to face up to the inevitability of "raging hormones" becoming the norm when the two sexes are in close proximity.

Gore Vidal, who died on Tuesday at age 86, was known primarily as a man of letters, writing numerous novels, essays, plays and screenplays throughout his long career. But his way with words extended beyond the page and into the realm of TV talk, where he made several notable appearances in his younger years. In 1968, Vidal covered the Democratic and Republican national conventions for ABC alongside conservative writer William F. Buckley. The two men were political opposites and their personalities clashed to the point where Vidal instructed Buckley to "shut up a minute" and referred to him as a "crypto-Nazi.

My memory of William F. Buckley Jr., the pioneering conservative writer who died at 82 last week while writing at his desk in Connecticut, is from the prime of his life -- but also about the end of life. It began with an unexpected phone call to my Tokyo home around 1977. The caller had that distinctive, erudite vocabulary; a wisp of a Southern accent; and patient cadence, as if . . . he . . . spoke . . . slowly . . . to . . . kindly . . . allow . . . me time to grasp his meaning.

It's hard for a lot of people, particularly on the right, to recognize that the conservative movement's problems are mostly problems of success. The Republican Party's problems are much more recognizable as the problems of failure, including the failure to recognize the limits of that movement's success. American conservatism began as a kind of intellectual hobbyist's group with little hope of changing the broader society. Albert Jay Nock, the cape-wearing libertarian intellectual - he called himself a "philosophical anarchist" - who inspired a very young William F. Buckley Jr., argued that political change was impossible because the masses were rubes, goons, fools or sheep, victims of the eternal tendency of the powerful to exploit the powerless.

William A. Rusher, a leading theorist and organizer of the modern conservative movement who helped William F. Buckley Jr. build the National Review into one of the American right's most influential journals, died Saturday at a retirement home in San Francisco. He was 87. Rusher, who was also a syndicated columnist and author, died of causes related to old age, said Brian T. Kennedy, president of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank where Rusher had been a research fellow since 1989.

I arrived at the Gore Vidal tribute at Musso & Frank and was directed to Alan Selka, a Brit resplendent in paisley print dinner jacket, tie and waistcoat - yes, a waistcoat. "Sort of," said Selka, when I asked if he had come to the Hollywood landmark to celebrate the American novelist, playwright, political essayist and screenwriter, who died July 31 at his Hollywood Hills home at age 86. Selka, longtime butler to a Hollywood executive whom I agreed not to name, explained that he'd been introduced to Vidal by Ali MacGraw in the back of a limousine.